Monthly Archives: February 2009

All well and good, at least at the beginning. No more than the usual family drama.

Until at 11:30pm, I go on down to the basement to see if there’s any Coke or Pepsi down there.

And I find that there’s water in the basement. Lots of water. And fairly deep water, too. Turns out that the water heater broke and has been leaking for eff knows how long. ALl over the basement. Where we keep all our crap. All of it. So my dad gets out his water-sucker-upper thing and goes at it, while the rest of the family is on moving-shit-out-of-the-way duty. Not fun at any time, even less fun, actually, at midnight.

About half an hour later, dad’s water thing breaks. Stil lots of water all over the floor. On the plus side, we’ve moved everything to safer parts of the basement. So he orders us to go back upstairs and ransack the house for rolls of paper towel. Yep. We then set about mopping up the basement with *paper towels*.

An hour and a half later, we’re out of paper towels and there’s still water left. Dad turns to me and my sister and says “Go out and get more paper towels.” If you’re keeping track, it’s now 1:30am. So E and I head out, practically hysterical at the absurdity of the situation.

We’re driving and E says, “We’ll probably get stopped, just because anyone out on the road at this hour ends up being.” [hysterical laughter from both of us]

Catching my breath, I say, “Well, when they stop us, the most important thing [laughter] is to *not* laugh [even more hysterical laughter]

We make it to a 24-hour supermarket, and grab a 15-roll pack of paper towels, still laughing pretty hysterically. Had you seen the pair of us, I am certain you would have thought us stoned and or drunk. We pay for it, and what clinched the night was that the woman that rang us up says “Have fun with that, girls”

We head back into the basement and continue the triage. We decide that cement and metal don’t rot, but that wood does, and so we focus our efforts around the wood supporting the stairs, and once that’s done (about 2:30am), we decide that we’ve done more than enough work.

So we head back upstairs. Dad’s done his end and we will now have it fixed on Monday. Probably. (I go home on Monday, though, so it doesn’t really affect me). The downside? We’ve got no hot water until then. Flush the toilet? Sure. But showers? Only if you want them so cold that your head hurts. I did that last night, just to get it over with. I have firm intentions of not showering until Monday morning, when I get home. Where the water is warm.

I feel like the past 12 hours of my life were some kind of surreal experience.

So, I learned with some disappointment that Patrick Rothfuss’s new book won’t be coming out in April, so I can add that to the list of books-to-be-waited-for, along with George R R Martin. Looking forward to both of them, and for both of them I’d much rather have a good book than a quick book. Besides, I have Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly One” as an ARC (*squee*) and I’m fairly sure that will take me a good deal of time to read. Beyond that, I’m re-reading (again) Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, because I started to read Book 8 (Toll the Hounds) and I realized that I must have missed some crucial scene because there seemed to be a giant bit that I was missing. So, the re-reading. I want to actually know what’s going on when the 9th comes out (August, methinks). Alternately not doing enough reading and doing too much. I suppose it’d be nice if I could actually get into a rhythm, but I’m not holding my breath.

The writing is not going so well. Or rather, it’s not going much at all. I’ve recently decided that something would work a hell of a lot better in first person than third, which obviously necessitates re-writing. On the other hand, I might just be procrastinating so that I don’t have to deal with the horror of sending out queries and the fairly inevitable rejections. If I keep telling myself it needs more editing/rewriting/whatever, I can get out of it.

Still slogging away on 2YN, and no idea where that’s going to take me, if it’s going to lead to anything worthwhile or not. I think it’s probably too early to tell at this point, but so long as I’ve got the time, I don’t see any reason not to continue with it. At the very least, it gives me stuff to think about and potential ideas for the future.

I have been determinedly not thinking about Nano. It depends too much on what happens after I graduate. With a 9-5, according to my meticulous calculations it *should* still be possible for me to write a million words, but it would be really, really tough. If I have a job, that is. If I’m living at home with my parents, I may not be able to because it’s not the kind of thing they understand very well. I’ve got the barest idea of what I’d write about, but I’ll wait until at least this summer to do anything about it.

As for right now, I should be doing a bit of tidying up, then off to class, then home for Mom’s birthday this weekend.